Principles of Condensed Matter Physics

Rating:
Summary: A Fine Text and an Excellent Reference
Review: For most researchers, this book will be used as a reference when they seek a rigorous treatment of one of the many aspects of condensed matter physics. Many familiar topics such as Debye-Hückel theory or elasticity are framed in a broader context that includes not only treatments of differeing degrees of exactness but also greater generality. A reader interested in a narrow topic may find it necessary to read an entire chapter rather than a certain narrow section to gain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter. In the reviewer's view, this is a good thing.

What makes this book a good reference is that the individual chapters are usually self contained - requiring some but not excessive familiarity with chapters that have gone before. This allows the reader to gain insight into the various aspects of the subject one at a time as needed.

As a text, this book is written so as to be accessable to the student encountering the subject matter for the first time but assumes a reasonable familiarity with thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. A strong course in physical chemistry would certainly provide sufficient background.

Overall, this is a fine book for those who wish to pursue the various topics in condensed matter physics thoughtfully and in earnest.

Rating:
Summary: Exhaustive treatment of soft matter physics!
Review: Given my training as engineer in undergraduate and as polymer scientist in my MS, I find this book a challenging endevour. It presupposes knowledge of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, and is written in a style most beneficial for Physics graduate students. Nonetheless, since every serious student in material science and polymer physics must indeed become comfortable with soft matter physics, this book is a delightful introduction. The book by RAL Jones can provide a quick introduction to phenomenon and principles encountered in the book. But to master the trade, to become comfortable with notation used in papers, to understand the math, to make yourself a soft matter physicist, this book provides matter, paradigm and principles in comprehensive manner.

Specifically book is essential reading for people studying physics of crystals, liquid crystals, amorphous materials, polymers and magnetically ordered systems. It provides detailed introduction to symmetry, phase transitions, field theories, scattering and correlation functions, and generalized elasticity and hydrodynamics. Each chapter and topic can be appreaciated by additional reading from a textbook each in Statistical Mechanics (Pathria), Electrodynamics (Slater and Frank), Quantum Mechanics, liquid crystals (chandrashekar or de gennes, polymers (doi, de gennes) and scattering (neutron-higgins, light-pecora). Like potential readers, I am myself a student, just starting on this daunting but worthwhile study of condensed matter.

Rating:
Summary: Best basic condensed matter textbook
Review: It is not only a "soft Condensed Matter" book. This book has every basic (or kinda advanced) ideas of condensed matter physics. And there is almost no prerequisite for this book --- a reader needn't even know any solid state physics before he reads this book. The text is well written and easy to read.
--- These are all the features of a perfect textbook.